Sitemaps are a great way to help search engines crawl your website, and monitor a website's indexing progress. Our Sitemap Report helps you make sure that your sitemaps are complete, correct and submitted to search console. This article explains how to use the report.
Sitemap overview
The sitemap overview shows you a list of all the sitemaps we found on your site, including the following details:
- URL of the sitemap
- Number of pages found in that sitemap (click view to see all the pages)
- Whether or not this sitemap was submitted to Google Search Console (only available if you've connected your Google account)
- A link to the sitemap report in Search Console, so you can quickly see the details (only available if you've connected your Google account)
Normally our crawler automatically detects your sitemaps based on your robots.txt file, and by checking common sitemap paths. This also includes crawling any sub-sitemaps.
If for some reason our crawler could not find all your sitemaps, you can add a sitemap manually by clicking the Add sitemap link. After adding it, we'll also crawl that sitemaps.
Downloading the sitemap
To quickly get a complete sitemap based on our crawl, click the Download full sitemap link in the sitemap report. This gives you an XML file with all the pages. If your CMS doesn't automatically generate a sitemap, you can upload this file to your server and submit it to Google Search Console.
Missing pages
The missing pages section shows you a list of pages that we found during the crawl, but which are not included in your sitemaps. Any pages that are marked as noindex are not included in this list.
Normally, it's a good idea to add every page that you want to be indexed to your sitemap. For every page that is not in your sitemap, try to find out why it is missing and add it if you can. This will speed up indexing of these pages, and helps you get the full picture of your Google indexing status.
Error pages
The error pages section shows a list of pages that are in your sitemap, but that do not exist, or do not work. This can include pages that have been removed from the server, but not from the sitemap.
It's a good idea to remove these pages from your sitemap, because it takes up unneeded crawl budget from search engines.
Redirected URLs
The redirected URLs section shows all pages that are listed in your sitemap, but are redirected with either a 301, 302, 303 or 307 response code.
Search engines will normally follow redirects and index the right pages. But to make crawling more efficient, it's best to directly point the search engine to the URL that you want to be indexed, instead of a redirect. Use this section of the report to spot pages that are redirected, and replace them with the new, final URL.
